Tag: Ramana

Do we create reality, or are we reality itself?


Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

For many years I had read how we create our own reality. This was a great puzzle to me. Of course, it’s quite easy to repeat what others have said and then convince yourself that it’s true. This is called belief. Belief is not knowing; it is not a realization. You can believe that out-of-body experiences are real, but unless you have had one or a thousand then you don’t really know what it feels, looks, or sounds like. It remains an idea, but not a realization. You can also believe that life has a purpose, but it is only the conditioned mind that tells you this out of belief and not as a fact. And you can believe that you create your own reality, but unless you fully see this then it remains a belief.

Consciousness is the totality of all that is. It is existence at all levels, including all emotions as well as pairs of opposites that we call duality. Consciousness is a field of potentialities pertaining to what may or can happen, as well as the entire range of experiences, phenomena, expressions, and thoughts. The contents of consciousness is consciousness; it’s the whole enchilada, uninterrupted. And this totality is each one of us. It is as much in us as it is us.

Consciousness as the totality
Everything is consciousness; it’s the singular movement of life, and because we are all consciousness then we know of all of the dualities of hot and cold, good and bad, caring and uncaring, smart and stupid, loud and quiet, tall and short, wild and controlled, chaotic and ordered, and so on. It is the brain and mind that makes this possible.

The writer creates reality
As consciousness, we all are the creators of our own reality, each and every waking moment, as well as in every moment of a dream or daydream. When you look into this to see for yourself you can consider that all of the good, bad, and indifferent are within you.

Delving deep into consciousness in my new book

When I wrote Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience, I knew I was jumping into turbulent waters, because there is such a huge divide between materialist science and spirituality. Strangely, as I discovered in the process of writing, both religious people and materialist scientists base their opinions about spirituality on beliefs. Both ends of the spectrum swear that they are right and that they have the answers to life’s questions, including what consciousness is. But it turns out that a belief is a belief, which means that the believer has no idea of what the truth is, yet this is what shapes most people’s opinions and actions.

Consciousness isn’t a book for everyone, because it’s quite honest in its approach to who we are and why we see the world in our own unique ways. Honesty does not sit well with the egoic sense of self. The self has been conditioned since birth to believe it is a body and all of the attachments and identities that go along with it. In essence, people are not who they take themselves to be; they are amalgams of thoughts that are unreliable, ephemeral, and changeable.

Although we are quiet complex people, this book is easier reading than it looks!

In Consciousness, I discuss all sorts of ideas of what consciousness is, according to the experts who ironically really do not know very much outside of their own guesses and iffy conclusions, whether they are scientists or self-proclaimed New Age experts. If you are alive, you are experiencing consciousness.

This book also dives into the many experiences in consciousness — near death and out of body experiences, dreaming, lucid dreaming, intuition, hallucinogenic trips, imagination, quantum entanglement, and more.

It’s so easy that it’s hard
So how do you get to the bottom of what consciousness is? The answer is so easy that it is mostly overlooked. In addition to my experience with many years of self-enquiry meditation, I turned to some of the most respected and profound teachers who have realized their own natures by waking up to what they are not. That’s right, what they are not. This means that we all have the ability to observe our own state of being and see where thoughts come from, how they rise and fall, and how they accrete to form a sense of self.

A number of gurus have taught about finding one’s true nature as consciousness down through the ages, from Buddha to Rumi, and from Jiddu Krishnamurti to Ramana Maharshi. These individuals have all said the same thing: You cannot rely on information, teachings, rituals, religion, ideas, thinking, or practice to realize consciousness; you just have to observe with great persistence, desire, and interest, and eventually it dawns on you who you are.

If you are too tied to your beliefs about who you are, as well as the teachings of New Age philosophy, religion, or materialist science, then don’t take this book personally. You can read it for an intellectual understanding. Or if you are brave enough you can look into your own self at the deepest level and in the process let go of your preconceptions and suppositions. Read the book and investigate your own nature. It’s quite rewarding if you can do it.

Happy reading!

#neardeathexperiences #outofbodyexperiences #dreams #quantumentanglement

Find out who we really are, beyond the mind

Recently I published two books about the mind and how it creates stress, happiness, illness, and health. The books are Stressing Out Over Happiness, and The Guidebook to Stress, Meditation and Happiness. My goal is to go far past the subject of the mind. This is why I wrote my latest book, 13 Pillars of Enlightenment, which is a novel about self-realization and enlightenment. Through the eyes of its protagonist this book takes you on a journey into the sense of self and then far beyond. It took me more than 60 years of research and a year to write this book.

This new work is a short narrative novel that leads you to find the most mysterious and illusive aspect of life throughout the ages. It’s been called self realization, enlightenment, or realizing your true nature. Nonetheless, these terms are relatively meaningless and can only point to what exists behind that which we call the mind, body, and reality. I am hoping that this book can point you toward your own realization about who you are, if that’s what you desire.

My goal is to share the most fundamental tenets related to enlightenment. In the book I also go into the problem of language in trying to shed light on something that is beyond language, concepts, and images. Ultimately, I hope that you will be able to find out for yourself where thoughts come from, how they form the sense of self and the world that seems to exist, and how to discover the true nature of the essence of existence.